Many photographers are in the business of taking pictures of events, such as sporting events. With the increasing volume of images being created, a problem has arisen that it can be difficult to organize, store, and locate a particular image. A company or individual may want to find an image of their favorite player from a particular play. However, using a general internet search will return hundreds or possibly even more images of that player. The user will then have to sort through all of the images manually in an effort to locate a particular picture of a player on a given play and game. This takes a lot of time and can leave users frustrated at being unable to quickly locate their favorite picture.
Museums, libraries, and archives are also struggling under the weight of responsibility for the collecting, organizing, and preserving of digital materials (“digital assets”). In the modern era, these digital assets include massive amounts of born digital photographs and video footage. This situation is further complicated by the need to combine these more recent born digital assets with digitized historical assets such as those in the archive of museums so that there is a single digital asset repository rather than multiple “silos” of digital content within the organization. Tens of thousands of born digital still images and thousands of hours of born digital video are taken by even a group of photographers. Moreover, large amounts of historical documentation (images, video, and game data) from throughout much of the past century are held in archives in museums.
As a result, there is a need for digital asset management systems and methods that will index sports images for quick retrieval in a way that consolidates digitized historical and current “born digital” assets taken from games over time.